“It is as absurd to say that a man can’t love one woman all the time as it is to say that a violinist needs several violins to play the same piece of music.”

The greater a man’s talents, the more marked his idiosyncracies. Yet in the provinces originality is considered perilously close to lunacy.

The more you judge, the less you love.

Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.

In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Virtue is not a thing you can have by halves; it is or it is not.

In the first woman we love, we love everything. Growing older, we love the woman only.

In intimate family life, there comes a moment when children, willingly or no, become the judges of their parents.

Old men are prone to invest the futures of young men with their own past sorrows.

Poverty is a divine stepmother who does for youths what their own mothers were unable to do. It introduces them to frugality, to the world and to life.

To be happy, a man must love his wife as she chooses to be loved.

A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.

Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.

Can you find a man who loves the occupation that provides him with a livelihood? Professions are like marriages; we end by feeling only their inconveniences.

How can we explain the perpetuity of envy–a vice which yields no return?

How sternly we reproach virtue for its failings, how indulgent we are to the better qualities of vice!

The vote is the most powerful nonviolent tool we have.

One thing that concerns me is that today’s young women don’t seem to care that we have a fundamental instrument of government that makes no express statement about the equal citizenship stature of men and women.

If we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity.

Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.

No, painting is not interior decoration. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.

I am an Instrument of Nature.Love is my message.

All music is is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments.

The only people I truly envy are those who can play a musical instrument and those who can eat anything they want without gaining weight.